We flew to Tokyo for master classes.
Werner. Jerome. Landmark.
The auditorium filled with people, notebooks open.
Silent,
uncomfortable,
knowing the work that was unfolding.
No-thing.
Not nothing.
No-thing.
If you are not your body,
where is the you that you are?
If you observe something happen,
how much does observation shape what’s happening?
Where is what’s happening happening?
Where is the observation located?
We spent hours looking at the filters through which we see our lives.
By evening of the first day,
I got I’m the source of what happens.
That the man I am married to does not exist outside of me.
At night, me and my occurring husband
found cheesecake in Ginza,
tonkatsu in a glass tower high above the city lights,
back-alley sashimi still moving on the plate.
The next morning, Werner said,
“You never see people.
You never experience another person directly,
only through your interpretation of them.
You see what you decided and filed about them.
You filter them out so your system has bandwidth
to scan for threats,
to keep you small,
to keep you safe,
to let the amygdala run your life.”
He stood on stage and formed a grid with the digits of his hands
to illustrate what he calls the filter of fast-moving particles
through which we experience life.
He said, if you can see and remove your filter,
every moment of life hits you as an aesthetic experience.
It will touch you.
It will move you.
If you don’t,
you’re run by a nervous system only interested in survival.
A reflex.
Once I got that,
I got that nothing is real
other than what I say is real in the moment.
I had lunch with my occurring husband.
Ramen.
He wept, and in the reflection of his tears I saw he saw me.
Since then, even on days I fall short,
he calls me a good mother,
a good wife,
a good cook.
He isn’t describing me.
He’s creating his occurring of me, for me.
It’s the same freedom I touched in On Nitpicking;
the moment I dropped “something was wrong”
and created my occurring husband again. He was back.
For the ontological foundation of this work, see
Placement: Ontology of the Embodied Self —
the philosophical counterpart to the scientific paper
Placement: Toward Recognition as a Somatic Healing Modality.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17444167
For applied practice, see how Placement lives in the body → Protocols